In this seminar, Gabriela Ramos shares how the target to reduce the gender gap in labor force participation in G20 countries was agreed. Furthermore, she discusses how the OECD contributed by providing evidence on the business case for gender equality, highlighting the support from major countries and leaders. Ramos references the value of the OECD Gender Strategy to achieve this outcome, as it has been building strong evidence and international comparisons on the three domains it covers: education, employment, and entrepreneurship. She also covers the main policies to reduce the gaps in these domains. The main objective is that the OECD's Gender Strategy promotes family-friendly policies and greater well-being for both women and men. Finally, Ramos explains how to ensure effective implementation by monitoring progress in the implementation of the OECD gender recommendation and the G20 target.

Speaker: Gabriela Ramos, OECD Special Counsellor to the Secretary-General, Chief of Staff and Sherpa to the G20

This seminar explores how gender is enacted by founders of social ventures. In particular, Lakshmi Ramarajan looks at how female social venture founders conform to cultural beliefs about gender-appropriate activities and how this conformity may be reinforced or disrupted by characteristics of the environment in which they are embedded. She argues that the trend towards the use of commercial activities in social ventures is inconsistent with cultural beliefs about gender for female founders of social ventures. Using data on 590 new U.S.-based social ventures during 2007-2008, Ramarajan examined the conditions under which commercial activities are more or less likely to be used by female founders. Results show that female founders of social ventures are less likely to use commercial activities than male founders and that the social venture founders’ local community context moderates this effect in two ways: the prevalence of women-run businesses in the social venture founder`s local community weakens the enactment of gender, while the influence of gender on the use of commercial activities is stronger when the intended beneficiaries of the social ventures are local.

In this seminar, the recent efforts by the Department of Education’s
Office of Civil Rights (OCR) to enforce Title IX policy are considered
in the broader context of unsuccessful attempts to establish protection
of sexual violence as a civil right in the United States. OCR
enforcement has stimulated both praise for its bold determination to
address an epidemic of sexual violence on college campuses and criticism
for its capacious exercise of administrative power. Bumiller reframes
this debate by considering how these regulatory measures are a new
chapter in a varied and complex story about the effectiveness of public
enforcement of civil rights statutes through the combination of
administrative and judicial action. Her work questions whether over
reliance on public agency enforcement potentially weakens the
participatory and democratic effects of private action. She also
examines how current federal regulations regarding Title IX continue a
pattern that over emphasizes criminal justice priorities.

Speaker: Kristin Bumiller, George Daniel Olds Professor in Economic and Social Institutions; Chair of Political Science, Amherst College

Rape is common during wartime, but even within the context of the same war, some armed groups perpetrate rape on a massive scale while others never do. In this seminar, Dara Kay Cohen discusses her new book, Rape during Civil War, and examines variation in the severity and perpetrators of rape using an original dataset of reported rape during all major civil wars from 1980 to 2012. Cohen also conducted extensive fieldwork, including interviews with perpetrators of wartime rape, in Sierra Leone, Timor-Leste and El Salvador. Combining evidence from these interviews with statistical analysis of the quantitative data, Cohen argues that armed groups that recruit their fighters through the random abduction of strangers use rape—and especially gang rape—to create bonds of loyalty and trust between soldiers. Results from the book lay the groundwork for the systematic analysis of an understudied form of civilian abuse, and will be useful to policymakers seeking to understand and to mitigate the horrors of wartime rape.